Share Your Favorite On-Screen Walking Scenes

As the mercury dips, my appetite for screen time increases. With the recent release of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life on Netflix, I decided to go back in time to watch the original series. The first 30 seconds of “Pilot” is the lead character, Loralei Gilmore walking along the Main Street of the fictional town, Stars Hollow. On this street she is joined by dog walkers, a family with a stroller, a skateboarder and cyclist, people sitting on benches, and yes, even a few cars.

Instead of binge watching the next seven seasons of Gilmore Girls, it made me want to hop off the couch and go for a stroll to my local coffee shop. It made me wonder what other walking scenes have caught streets.mn readers’ attention.

Join me in the comments with details of your favorite on-screen walking scenes. If you need some inspiration, check out Bill Lindeke’s classic sidewalks of the silver screen category on his blog Twin Cities Sidewalks. What do you like about them? What lessons can from these scenes can we apply to land-use and transportation issues?

Related:Walk This Way! – a montage of the “follow shot” often used in movies.

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About Janelle Nivens

Janelle is an urban explorer who likes to challenge herself to walk long distances (40 miles is her record). She lives in southwest Minneapolis with Scott and their adorable dog Stewie and works at the University of Minnesota. Janelle documents what catches her eye on long walks in hopes of inspiring others to discover hidden gems in their own communities. Walk with her on Instagram, Twitter (@Janellie23), and FitBit.

24 Responses to Share Your Favorite On-Screen Walking Scenes

I love all the walking and biking scenes of East London in “Call the Midwife.” The midwives all ride bikes to their appointments. As a lover of retro fashion I adore their capes and the way they move as the nurses weave through sidewalk peddlers, cars, children playing, and all the other London street life. Even if the show weren’t great in itself, I would watch it just for the clothing and bikes.

Yeah, thanks for the shoutout. Many/most of the scenes I linked to in the videos have been removed for copyright infringement, but they were working when I posted them. The classic is probably the “I’m walkin’ here” thing from Midnight Cowboy, but that’s just the tip of a very large iceberg that includes the intro credits Saturday Night Fever, a handful of Woody Allen films, and a billion other great bits.

A scene that sticks with me is in the movie Venus – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_(film) – starring Peter O’Toole. An early scene shows his character and friend walking the streets of their London neighborhood and doing little shopping. It is a fleeting walking scene, but stuck with me as a great life for senior citizens. How nice to be able to walk to a nearby cafe to meet a friend, then walk to shopping, etc.?

Oh man, I’ve had a crush on Lauren Graham since about 1996, so I got sucked into watching Gilmore Girls a couple years ago. Overall it’s a fun show, and I liked many of their sidewalk scenes. However, it sometimes felt like the show had no concept of travel time by car, which was one of its many oddities.

The Back to the Future series sticks out as having some of the most memorable street scenes for me, even though they didn’t necessarily occur on the sidewalk. The skateboard/hoverboard chases run all through the center of Hill Valley, and the series did a relatively good job of showing how car culture and urban decay overran the what was a clean and walkable downtown in the ’50s and replaced it with a much dingier place by the ’80s. Even the central park had been replaced by a parking lot.

That highlights another of my bigger issues with Gilmore Girls — the town of Stars Hollow often seemed way too airbrushed to feel real, much like that polished idea of Hill Valley from the ’50s. But that often happens on TV and in the movies. Sprawl is not camera-friendly, so urban and more traditional small-town layouts are often what you see when filmmakers try to depict street scenes.

I thought the pacing of the walkers in the 30 seconds I mentioned was comically staged. With the exception of an old-timey truck making a delivery by pulling up to the front door (blocking the sidewalk) there are no cars parked on the street.

The film picks up the story in “Before Sunrise” of a young American man (Ethan Hawke) and French woman (Julie Delpy) who spent a passionate night together in Vienna. Their paths intersect nine years later in Paris, and the film takes place in real time as they spend an afternoon together. Most of the film records the two walking and talking in Paris. Beautiful street scenes and cafes provide the backdrop for their conversation.

Great topic! Longtime Gilmore Girls fan here (albeit one slightly disappointed by Year in the Life). Not only did I love watching Lorelei and Rory walking, I loved seeing the extras in the background cross the street willy-nilly without regard for crosswalks.

Speaking of fantasy, sci-fi does an awesome job showing human-scaled placemaking. Virtually every place in Firefly is built around foot traffic, both the grittier trading posts and the aristocratic urban areas. Star Wars, outside of Coruscent, typically imagines its places around markets and small shops with heavy foot traffic. Battlestar Galactica mostly took place in space. But when it did come to down to the ground, the cities were always walkable places. I think this fits with Mike Hicks’ comment that we normally don’t think of sprawl when we imagine cities — even when imagining cities of the future (or “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”).

Streetscapes don’t always get love, though. A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece here about how Judd Apatow’s portrayal of cars vs. bike/ped changed abruptly with his Amy Schumer film Trainwreck:

Partly that’s because Trainwreck takes place in New York. But even taking that into account, it’s still impossible to ignore that Apatow used a bike as a symbol for sexual immaturity (40-Year-Old Virgin) and cars as a sign of maturity (Virgin and Knocked Up).

Pharcyde’s “Drop”! music video by Spike Jonze!
produced by JDilla may his spirit live forever!

Aside for being a celebration of pedestrians, I would also describe this as “dope.”

Shit is-shit is ill, my flow still will spill
Toxic slick to shock you sick like electrocute
When I execute, acutely over the rhythm
On those that pollute, extra dosages is what I gotta give em
Got em mad and trembling
Cause I been up in my lad assembling
Missiles, to bomb the enemy
Because they envy me, and the making of my mad currency
Currently I think we’re in a state of an emergency
Cause niggas done sold their souls, and now their souls is hollow
And I think they can’t follow
They can’t swallow, the truth because it hurts
This is how I put it down, this is my earth, my turf
The worth of my birth is a billion, and you know what time it is
I’m going to make a million

I MEANCOMEONBRUH HOW DOPE IS THAT LAST LINE: it’s just a celebration of being human.

Real talk though: My favorite part about walking is having the ability to rap/sing to oneself. I really makes your life way better.